Thank you to all the people who provided feedback for the 1.5 modules alpha version. It turned out that the alpha has some severe bugs (for some users images don’t show up, some parameter settings are ignored etc) and is therefore for all intents and purposes useless. Even worse, with some of the bugs I have no idea how to fix them (since I can’t even reproduce them). I’m investigating the issues but I feel that I’m pretty much back to square one, so there won’t be much progress in the next days.
Need a bit of feedback for the 1.5 module
I received a report about a strange bug in the alpha for the content item module for 1.5. The bug description is as follows:
1. I have created a module (contentitem item type) which is displaying one specific article and “Read more” link. It works fine.
2. I have linked that same article to a menu item. And then link in your module changes. And I get 404 error.
I have so far been unable to reproduce this, but experience teaches that you can test only so many configurations yourself. So I’m curios, has anybody else observed this kind of behaviour?
Post 18, in which our hero suffers from a sudden lack of depth perception
I’m currently – temporarily – blind on one side, not because there is anything wrong with my eyes per se but because the left eye is swollen shut (i.e. the tissue around the eye is swollen). I’m now both on antihistamins and antibiotics because the doctor couldn’t tell if this is an allergic reaction or an infection. Where is Gregory House when you need him (”Damn, the patient has a verruca on the left big toe! Everybody knows when a patient with plantar warts eats horseradish they will excrete an enzyme that makes his Hypothalamus swell until it exerts pressure on the optic nerve” – “But Dr. House, the patient has not eaten any horseradish” – “Well then, go feed him some”) ?
This is a nuisance, no big deal, but it means more delay on programming work since I can’t properly read the screen. Sorry about that.
Miscellaneous
Busy busy busy… apart from the usual business there are some projects that have to be pulled through in quite a hurry. Berlin DJ Zuckermann needs a new site by the end of the month plus a somewhat embarrassed staff member from the Centrum Judaicum (New Synagogue Berlin – Centrum Judaicum Foundation) called to ask if I could do a small page for a new exhibition of theirs by the end of next week, which is a bit of short notice so to speak. So I won’t have much time for private stuff (only that I will still take the weekend off to visit the summer camp of the bike club Kuhle Wampe). But there are some things that shall not go unmentioned:
- Shuttle Endeavour has landed safely. There was a bit of worry about the heat shield that had been damaged in the launch but the damage had been investigated and NASA decided that repairs weren’t necessary. Obviously they were right. Go to the shuttle mission pages at nasa.gov and look at some images – the Shuttle is a magnificent craft and I’m sorry that it will soon be decomissioned.
- I finished Fifty Degrees Below by Kim Stanley Robinson, the Sequel to Forty Signs of Rain, and I still haven’t warmed up (global warming pun is accidental) to the series, partly because I still think it focuses to much on the private life of the characters but mostly because it reads more and more like a news report and less like science fiction. But please don’t let me detain you from reading it – both books are actually quite good, it’s more that at the moment I could rather do with something more escapist.
- If you’re into german science fiction: Jacob informs us that the second edition of the magazine Pandora is soon to hit the stores – he is one of the editors there, which gives him the opportuntiy to hang out with cool people like John Clute. Dang, I shouldn’t have given up on my writing career.
Now I going to burn some midnight oil to get some things off the desk. If you came to look for progress on the content item module for Joomla 1.5 I would urge you to download it and play around (not on production sites). I do not have much time to do testing on my own so I would be grateful for any comments.
But I have promises to keep
I promised that I would have a version of the content item module for Joomla 1.5 to test by the end of the week and here I am (I’m aware that in some parts of the world the new week actually starts on sunday but I will cheerfully ignore the fact).
This seemed to install fine and mostly work on Joomla 1.5 RC1, but pleased by advised that this is for testing only. So if you want to help me then play around with the thing and send me some feedback, but please please don’t use it in a production site, especially since in the next and hopefully more stable version filenames will change to reflect name changes in Joomla (content items are now called articles). Actually if somebody has an idea for a good and descriptive name I would be grateful.
So, this is the Alpha-Release of the content item module for Joomla 1.5 RC1. This will not work with previous versions: mod_contentitem1.zip. (By now there is a link to a download page in the sidebar).
Please send feedback by email or comment on this post.
And now please excuse me, I still have miles to go before I sleep.
Joomla 1.5 Users, bear with me
I started this blog a week ago or so and by now I’m getting about 150 visitors a day, almost exclusivly from the Joomla Forum, so I assume somebody is watching what I’m doing 
I’m currently rummaging around in the innards of Joomla 1.5 – despite many Betas I haven’t had the time to get familiar with the new API, so currently I sometimes have trouble to find my way around. A lot of things have been vastly improved, and some other things got at least a lot more complicated from a programming POV, so in some ways 1.5 is a completely different beast than 1.0.xx.
The good news is that work on the Content Item Module for 1.5 is making some progress – things are working in principle, even if the actual code is for now a bit garish. I guess I will release an alpha version by the end of the week (unless those nasty paying customers use all of my time..). So bear with me, just a little bit longer.
Content Item Module: New version for 1.0.xx scratched, work on 1.5 version starts
I was going to write a new version of the content item module that should have featured better code and a simple templating system. However it looks like nobody was troubled by mediocre code quality or missing features but that some people urgently need a version for Joomla 1.5, so I’ll scratch the new release for 1.0.xx and concentrate on a release for 1.5. This will still take a couple of days and will propably come with a reduced set of features (I think I’ll have to leave out the “merge” function in the first release), but at least you can be assured that I will work I’m working on it.
Joomla 1.0.xx Multiple Component per Page Workaround
Since I wrote a Module for Joomla to display content items in module positions I’ve been asked if it could be used to display other components than com_content in module positions as well. No it can’t and it would be to much work to change this. I can, however, offer a workaround that did the trick for me:
- Go to the Menu Manager and create a new Menu (but don’t publish it)
- Create a blank template (a template with just a mainbody call) or download and install from here: blank.zip
- In your new Menu create a Link to the item or component you want to display
- Go to template manager and assign the blank template to the link you’ve just created.
- Download mod_iframe.zip and install. This is a module that will insert an iframe in a module position and allow you to specify source url, height and width. Install the module.
- enter the link you’ve just created as source, assign a position and publish.
Quite probably you will need to edit the template.css file for the blank template so fonts and colors will fit in your main template – remember that the content of the iframe is a page on it’s own, even if it’s embedded in another page, and will not be affected by changes from your standard css files.
Usually all links to other sites would open inside the iframe, which is most likely not what you want. So I added a small Javascript to the blank template that opens relative links and links on the same server within the frame and outgoing links in a new window or tab (the javascript adds a target attribute and it depends on the browser how this is handled).
I can say that it worked for me with a fresh installation of Joomla 1.0.12. If you get any errors feel free to contact me, I’ll see if I can help you.
First !
I really didn’t mean to do this. There are so many blogs already, there seemed to be no point in adding another one.
It’s not that I don’t like to write – I’m as vain as the next man, and seeing your thoughts in writing makes them look more important (which undoubtly is the reason why blogs are so popular). It’s just that the stuff I write is usually tailored to specific audiences – speeches at science fiction cons, manuals for software I wrote or adapted, occasional ghostwriting, stuff like that. I’m used to do things for a purpose, and writing for an undefined audience seemed purposeless.
Only I’m a web programmer, and occasionally I have to build sites in wordpress. And by now I have to adapt or write software for wordpress, and I need a place to test the stuff I wrote. So this is the purpose of the blog: testing facility, code bloat ground zero, room for improvement, whatever. And since I have to maintain the software anyway I just as well may write the occasional blog post.
English is not my mother tongue, and I guess it shows. However bad english is a sort of lingua franca among people people who do web stuff (programmers, would-be programmers, users, designers, you name it), and I expect that most people who’ll drop by will do so in search of some web stuff, namely for some code I wrote for the Joomla CMS. To add a further purpose to this blog I’ll add a FAQ for that module (you’ll find the beginning of it in the side bar).
I really didn’t mean to do this, there are so many blogs already. Yet here I am, and already I’m fighting the temptation to go all verbose on you. Count yourself lucky that I can’t wait to get my first post published.
End of first message